Friday, April 10, 2020

Roland JD-990 | The Best Roland Module Ever?

In 1993 Roland released the JD-990, a synth module that has grown into a cult phenomenon. Many hail this as the greatest Roland synth module ever.
As with the JD-800, the 990 was forgotten at first. Few people saw the potential as it came between the popular JV-80 (and module 880) in 1992 and the mega popular Super JV-1080 that came in 1994.

Compared to the JD-800 this enhances pretty much everything. Some key differences are:

- More waveforms, 195 vs 108 on the 800
- The ability to pan each TONE individually, essential to make it so wide and lush
- A matrixed modulation setup
- Oscillator sync
- Effect structures
- Filter can self-oscillate
- Delays can be tempo synced to MIDI
- You can add a random modulation to a sound, sort of emulate drifting oscillators
- One slot for adding a SR-JV expansion card (the famous SR-JV80-04 vintage card comes to mind)